


Absence in a Vacuum (Where is the Feedback?)

by midnightxgarden



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Happy Ending, Minor Original Character(s), Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 12:10:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5665609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightxgarden/pseuds/midnightxgarden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara made some promises when she took a TARDIS and ran away, but does a frozen heart ever heal? (aka the story of how accidents bring the Doctor and Clara back together in spite of what the universe demands)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Absence in a Vacuum (Where is the Feedback?)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been in the works since "Hell Bent," but I haven't written anything in SO LONG that I had to whine and cry to [veradune](http://archiveofourown.org/users/veradune/pseuds/veradune) before I could finally get it right. So thanks, dear, you made this fic possible!

The first time it happens, it’s basically by accident. Clara and Ashildr have just scraped through a tense negotiation that ends in an all-out firefight as they make a run for the TARDIS. Clara’s still shaking pretty badly when she maneuvers the TARDIS into the Vortex. When she was with the Doctor, the adrenalin of surviving together would have had her high and excited; this time, she is just choked with fear and an overwhelming sense of loss.

Ashildr appears mainly unmoved by the events, and once she’s confirmed Clara got them away safely, she wanders from the console room into the heart of the ship. It’s in the silence that permeates the stark white room, that Clara realizes just how much she misses adventuring with the Doctor.

A tear hits the TARDIS console before she realizes she’s crying, and she brushes it away impatiently. “Why am I scared? I wouldn’t have been scared with you. I would have been laughing, and your face it would have been – “

She stops because she knows why it was okay with him. Because his face would have been terrified and elated and so caught up in her emotions, he would have barely had time for his own. He would have been there from the beginning, so she never would have gotten scared because he was the Doctor, and he always had her back.

“Is this what it’s like? Is this what you feel every time you lose us? How do you let yourself do this again and again?” she asks the empty console room.

Her TARDIS hums back, but the lack of Scottish brogue sets her heart on edge. It’s the first time since she found wiggle room outside of that Nevada desert that she wonders if she made the right choice taking the long way around. Because the long way around is so much better when he’s there, making her laugh, showing off.

“How can I do this without you?”

The silence that answers her doesn’t comfort her the way she hopes. So she does what she does best: fills it with the sound of her voice, telling him all the things she’d want him to know now. It’s not the answer, but it’s the only solution she has.

**

Clara makes a habit of telling him of her exploits with Ashildr. It’s a coping mechanism to push away the fear, doubt and loneliness. If she tells him about her adventures, he will never leave her completely. He will stay locked away in her mind with his memories of her still intact.

So Clara tells him of their successes, and triumphs and how the sun sets on a distant moon of New New Earth. She tells him how happy Ashildr has been to see the universe like this. She tells him about all the moments she’s been scared and lost and almost didn’t make it back to her fixed point.

Clara believes the universe will probably forget that the Doctor is only half of the Hybrid, and Clara Oswald is just as capable of burning it to the ground. And each adventure she has without him, that she tells her memory of him, the harder it is to stay away, to not going looking again and hope that this time he’s right, that he’ll know her when he sees her again, to break the promise they made to each other.

To not fulfill the prophecy that could end the universe, it’s a struggle that she reminds herself she took on when she took one half of the neural block and rolled the dice. Funny how rolling the dice on the future is so much easier when it’s done together. She holds onto his face, so sad and repentant when he tells her he deserves to forget, when she’s tempted to throw it all away and track him down again.

But it’s a not so secret desire to see him again; one that she never tells his memory. Because if she did, she’s not sure she could ever walk away from finding him.

**

It happens completely by accident. They are out on a planet that is part of a star system 35 million light years from Earth and 5000 years in contemporary Clara’s future. Clara doesn’t have the knowledge of the Time Lords, but she manages to stay away from fixed points well enough.

She and Ashildr are at a restaurant, giggling over running from angry guards because they snuck into the home of the most important painting on that planet, one so blobby and malformed that it makes a Rothko look intricate, when she hears a voice that would make her non-beating heart stop again.

“No, no, they just look human, in fact they all have quiet terrible vision and only one lung, makes racing quite dull.” There he is, silver hair a bit shorter than she remembers and the red velvet coat she left for him hanging just a bit loose, guiding two young humans (siblings, she thinks) through the crowded café.

Ashildr turns to her, eyes suddenly hard and worried, and says, “We should go.”

“It’s fine. I mean, it’s not like he knows me anymore. And look they’re just passing through. They’ll be gone in a tic.” She does her best to keep her voice level and even, but the breath she doesn’t need is caught in the back of her throat and her eyes are burning just a bit because he’s here and alive, and oh god, she didn’t think she missed him this much.

Ashildr sees right through her lie and stands, holding out her hand. “We’re going now.”

Clara opens her mouth to protest as she stands, turning to grab her bag from the floor beside her when she stumbles into someone and then back. One hand bracing herself against the ground and another on her bag as the few items from their tabletop clatter to the ground, she looks up to start in angrily when she sees Ashildr go white at the corner of her eye.

“You should watch where you’re going,” a low brogue mutters, and it hits Clara right behind the eyes.

All the insults and reprimands die on her lips when she looks up into eyes that are so familiar but lost to her now. “I – I am sorry,” she whispers because despite not needing air to form words, she has suddenly lost all the breath in her body.

For one half a second as she stares into blue eyes that have no right to recognize her, she sees something of the man she loved enough to destroy the universe for. It dies out almost as quickly as it rises, and in its place a quieter and more confused look fills his eyes all the way to his eyebrows. “Have we met before?” he asks, his Scottish accent thick in his confusion.

She laughs shakily. “Of course not. I am not from around here.”

He cocks his head to the side; ignoring the inquisitive stares from his two (oh god was she ever really the young) companions. “Neither am I, and unlike the rest of the locals, you don’t appear to have any lungs at all.”

She gives a tight smile. “I really must be going.”

She brushes past him, bag clutched against her chest, not looking at Ashildr who’s standing at the edge of that crowd that has started to gather to gawk at the spectacle, and she’s almost out of earshot when he says, “You still didn’t say where you’re from.”

She turns to look at him and almost loses her nerve when she sees the stark confusion writ across his face. It’s too familiar and alien all at once. “Not from anywhere you can ever go.”

It’s clear that of all the answers she could have given, that was not one he was expecting because he opens and then closes his mouth, and she takes his silence as an opportunity to flee.

Two blocks down and half a block from the TARDIS, Ashildr materializes at her side, a silent shadow until they are safely in the galaxy’s outer reaches.

“Next time,” Ashildr starts.

“Next time I won’t stay long enough to confirm that it’s not just a ghost,” Clara vows.

The TARDIS and Ashildr do not respond, and Clara takes the silence as a begrudging acceptance.

**

The next three times she crosses paths with the Doctor, she calls on all number of excuses. Bad timing, karma catching up to her, and most pathetically, maybe he can sense her?

Ashildr snorts at that one. And for one blinding moment, Clara sees red.

“He was willing to end the universe to save me, not anything I asked for, mind you, but he was going to do it anyway. Is it really that hard to believe that there might be something there that allows him to feel me? That even though the memory wipe worked at first, over time it might fade and he might try to find me again, that he might actually somehow know who I am.”

Her voice breaks, and she lowers her head into the TARDIS controls. The TARDIS hums up at her soothingly. Despite not being telepathic in the least, her TARDIS has managed to form a rudimentary form of communication with her. Clara might not always know what she’s trying to say, but the TARDIS seems to sense her emotions and react accordingly. It is both eerie and comforting to have a sentient ship; something she took for granted when it was not her own.

“You should be more careful. If he figures out who you are, there’s no saying he won’t come back for you, and then where will we be?” Ashildr gives her one sympathetic glance before she leaves her in the console room alone.

Clara sighs and answers quietly, “Not alone anymore.”

But even the hole in her heart can’t quite overcome the voice in her head telling her never to be cowardly. Sometimes she thinks it’s unfair that she was stuck with the memories; at least he had millennia of practice.

Then she remembers how empty her life would be because she knows just as he can’t remember her face or her smile, she too would be able to remember the adventure but not being able to live it again would kill her more surely than the thought of his love.

**

The fifth time they meet, Clara definitely has nothing to do with how it happens. But that doesn’t mean his companions don’t.

Margarete and Julian corner her as she’s racing from one alien threat or another (when she starts to tell the memory of him later is does not seem to matter) and one second, she’s fearing for her life, and the next, two young adults have her locked in a closet with twin stares of determined confusion. In retrospect, it’s an obvious set-up, but in the moment, she’s more confused than ever.

“Are you her?” Julian asks.

Clara is unsure of the rules here. She knows she can’t let the Doctor remember her, but his companions are more of a nebulous area. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb. We’ve seen you four times in the past three months, and each time we do, he gets more and more withdrawn. Not that he’s ever been very, erm, _soppy,_ but he’s more in his head now, as though he’s trying to figure out a really complicated puzzle.”

Margarete seems incredibly unimpressed by her bluff, and Clara’s not sure what to say because her heart is aching worse than it has since she left him abandoned in the Nevada desert. “I didn’t mean to do that. He’s not supposed to remember.”

Both of them perk up at that, and that’s when Clara realizes she assumed they knew more than they do. “Remember what? What did you do to him?”

Clara laughs just once. Oh God, what hasn’t she done to him? “Nothing and everything, I suppose.”

Margarete shoots her a hard glare. "That’s not a real answer. How can you have done nothing and everything?”

Clara opens her mouth to respond, when the door flies open, and a blur of dark red stumbles into the room. He’s all uncoordinated limbs and a tuff of grey curls, and Clara would swear her heart constricts in her chest.

“Quite quick thinking, hiding in this closet, but I am not sure how long –” He pauses mid spin, eyes breezing over his companions and narrowing in on her. His face contorts as though he’s trying to recall something on the edge of his mind, and her heart breaks just a tiny bit more.

“You don’t know me,” she insists quietly. She cannot believe any sound escaped what with her heart in her throat.

“I must,” he counters. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth remarking upon.”

“Your face; no it just had this look like –”

“Like I’ve met you before. Because I have or maybe I’m remembering the future again. I mean, premonition is just remembering…”

“… in the wrong direction.” And it’s not until his voice has tapered off that she realizes she spoke with him. Both companions gasp and give her a strange look, but Clara barely takes notice because all her senses are filling up with him.

His face hardens for half a second before his brain seems to recall the details of that conversation, and it’s in this moment that she would give up her TARDIS if she could just figure out how the neural block works on him.

_“Clara?”_

Hope and fear play equally across his face, and she steps forward and cups his cheek because it’s the most natural thing in the world. She’s bending all the rules in time and space that she swore she would uphold when she left him in a Nevada desert, but her name from his lips shatters whatever resolve she might have left.

“Doctor –” Of all the things he could do, him bending down to cut her off with the chastest of kisses was not among them. Her brain stops; all the background noise and thinking she has never quite managed to stop in her whole life dies down with the softest press of his lips to hers.

It’s like a reset button has been switched in her brain, and for the first time, she completely understands his need to destroy the universe for her. It’s a quiet kiss of promise, and she pushes back against him just a tiny bit before she breaks it.

His eyes go wide when she dares to look at them again, and in that moment, she knows he remembers. All the pieces that have gone missing crash across his face, and she does the only thing she can think might save the universe.

She runs.

Out the door into the line of fire with his shouts at her back. There’s a patter of running feet chasing her all the way back to her TARDIS where Ashildr is standing just inside the doors. She doesn’t even pause on her way to the lever that will fling them into the Vortex and as far away from the end of time (and the beginning of her pulse again) as she can get.

**

Months pass before she’s brave enough to land at the coordinates that started flashing in her TARDIS not long after her disappearing act. The lack of message attached to the coordinates is a relief; she knows it’s customary to include a missive with a TARDIS-to-TARDIS signal, but if there were any words she fears what reckless decision she would make.

“Will you meet him?” Ashildr asks her one day, two weeks after the message starts blinking on their monitors.

Clara studies the instruments carefully. “When the time is right,” she answers finally. “Soon, I believe, but I have to be sure.”

Ashildr has lived to the end of the universe before being snapped back into the throes of its life, and there are times when her age makes her blind to simple human truths. “Why prolong the inevitable? He will start pushing harder soon.”

“I know, but if I do it too soon, I will make a mistake. And we both know that if I make a mistake with him, it has consequences beyond what most people might imagine.” She is careful with her words because despite traveling with Ashildr for longer than she ever did with the Doctor, somethings she guards closely; the most important being her heart.  
  
“You have parted once before; I do not see –”

“That is exactly the point! You don’t see! We parted once before because the wounds were fresh for me, and he knew he pushed it too far. Give us each time to heal, and grieve, and miss each other, and imagine if we can make the same decision again. Because I bloody well can’t promise that if he asks me to come away, I won’t say yes. The universe be damned because at least we’ll both know the other isn’t walking around without half their souls.”

Tears course down her face, and she’s sure she’s a wreck, but the hole in her silent heart feels a tiny bit smaller even if bile rises in her throat. She’s never been so honest with anyone that didn’t have a crooked smile and a puff of silvery hair on his head before, and she’s not sure what to do about that. Because there’s a short list of topics off-limits in this TARDIS but the Doctor has always been among them.

Ashildr stays silent for a long moment, because there’s a short list of topics off-limits in this TARDIS but the Doctor has always been among them, before saying, “You’ve never once talked about him like that, you know. Not in all the years we’ve traveled together.” She walks to Clara’s side before carefully bumping her shoulder. “I would have listened. If you ever wanted to talk.”

“I couldn’t,” she pauses. “I can’t because then it’s real, and I have to admit that I left him under the assumption I’d never see him again. And now that that’s not it, that I can and I might; it’s too much.”

Ashildr pauses again before briefly pressing her lips against Clara’s forehead. “If I can help…” She trails off, and Clara doesn’t need to hear the words to understand that Ashildr will do anything she asks.

“Thank you.”

Ashildr presses her forehead against Clara’s shoulder for a long moment, and then she exits, leaving the room empty except for Clara and her thoughts. It’s amazing how small her limitless TARDIS feels in that moment.

The TARDIS gurgles up at her in concern, and she smiles softly. “Soon, old girl. We just have to be ready.”

**

Unlike every other time, when she lands in her early childhood at a coffee shop in Glasgow, it’s completely deliberate.

The funny thing about time travel is it could have been two hours or two years since he last saw her, but as long as they both get the coordinates right, they get to the café at the same time to have a chat that’s decades overdue.

The corner table he’s chosen has two coffees still steaming when she arrives, and he’s wearing the velvety coat she loves so well and fidgeting with the sugar spoon as he stares out the window at the passing people. She pauses at the door to admire the sight of him; his sharp profile is stark in the white light of the winter sun, and he’s impossibly old and young in this moment as he waits for her.

She slides quietly in the seat across from him, and when his blue eyes met her own, she almost bursts into tears. “Hi.”

He smiles as he studies her, and if he were anyone else, she’d feel self-conscious but his stare is as warm and welcome as her own. “Clara. You’re here.”

“Nowhere else I’d rather be.” And the unflinching honesty of the statement could be their undoing, but she promised herself no lies. Not this time. Not when it might be the last.

“I’ve missed you. Even when I couldn’t remember your face, I knew something was missing.”

She turns away from his confession because this is what she feared; too much honesty for her heart to handle. She gasps softly when he takes her hand that’s been fiddling with handle of her mug. She looks up and the naked need in his eyes must surely mirror her own. “I’ve missed you so much. God,” she hiccups quietly, “I started talking to you. Not you-you obviously, but my mind’s you, to make it easier. Not sure it actually helped.”

"It never does.” His smile is indulgent. “Except of course when it’s all that does.”

She rubs careful circles over his knuckles. “What do we do now?”

He laughs ruefully. “Why, Clara Oswald, whatever we want.”

Tears start falling freely from her eyes, and in two steps, he’s across to her side of the table, kissing one, then two tear tracks away from her cheeks before bundling her against his chest. She tries to ignore how right his arms feel when her mind won’t stop screaming how she’s ending the universe as she sips coffee in twentieth century Glasgow.

“Oh Clara, my Clara. I never would have asked you here if I hadn’t come up with a loophole, a cheat of the prophecy. A way for us to be together and not end the universe.”

She stills in his arms because she hasn’t dared hope for anything like this in ages. “You best start talking quick, old man, because if you’re wrong – ”

“Clara Oswald, I have a proposal for you. We can never travel together again.”

If her heart hadn’t already stopped, she knows it would have at his words. “Instead, let’s promise to meet when only when we feel a great need; at the quietest points in the universe? Points so unremarkable that even the presence of the Hybrid can’t make them extraordinary.”

She rests quietly against his chest for a long moment, and he lets her, seemingly content to hold her breathless body for as long as it takes. “There’s no way –”

He smiles sadly. “My dear girl, if there was a way for us to travel together, don’t you believe I would have swept you into the TARDIS the moment you walked through the doors?”

She knows he’s right, but she’s been selfish and hoping that she would get exactly what she wanted. Just the Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS traveling all of time and space, laughing at the silly Time Lords and their prophecies about the Hybrid. If she can live lifetimes between one heartbeat and the last, why can’t they just get a few more adventures together?

“It would never just be a few Clara, and you know it.” His voice is wistful and sad, and she would scold him for prying but she knows there’s no way he couldn’t not hear that thought with him holding her so close.

She props her chin against his chest to stare into his eyes. “How does it work?”

His face lights up, and her still heart clenches just a bit at the hope that radiates out from him like a beacon. He leans down to press a soft kiss to her lips, like her acceptance is too much to hold within his own skin. “Not sure, exactly. But I suspect if we do like we did just now; with messages via TARDIS comms and such, and we pick the quietest moments in time; we might be able to steal a few more moments. Just existing together for a space before…”

She considers. It’s not what she wants. She wants all of time and space and his hand forever slotted in her own until they tire of running, and she goes back to Trap Street with enough memories to fill a thousand lifetimes. But she’s practical enough to accept that there is no way that if they were to tear across the universe together that there would not be another moment that would push one of them to extremes again. She has her own TARDIS now and that makes her all the more dangerous.

“Okay, Doctor. You have a deal.”

He lifts her up off the ground to spin her around, and if she hadn’t given up on such petty human emotions like embarrassment ages ago, she would have flushed bright red as the entire shop turns to look at them.

He sets her down and takes half a step back, but never relinquishes her hand, and in a moment of clarity, she realizes that he won’t be letting her go again. “So Doctor, what did you have planned for this meeting?”

The Doctor flushes slightly. “I was thinking maybe some chips, and then I have a reservation for dinner and a place to go after if you’d like.”

She raises one eyebrow. “A place after?”

“It’s just a hotel room, but I can get another if you’d like your space. I know I’ve been a bit presumptuous in the past and I don’t –”

She giggles once and goes up on her tiptoes to stem the flow with a kiss, a small thrill rippling across her body that she can finally do this. “No, no, it’s lovely. And you’re sure that there’s nothing about this point we can mess up, yeah?”

“Why, Miss Oswald, I swear that the only extraordinary thing about Glasgow this winter is you.”

She blushes red and thinks, if this is all she’s got left, these stolen moments between one heart beat and the last, she will make do. Because he’s flesh and blood and two heart beats in place of her none, and a voice that’s not just an echo in her mind. It’s not the solution she wants, but it’s the only answer she’s got. And it’s enough.


End file.
